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Abstract

The family Dolichopodidae forms two of the four largest evolutionary radiations in the Hawaiian Islands across all flies: Campsicnemus (183 spp) and the Eurynogaster complex (66 spp). They also include a small radiation of Conchopus (6 spp). A handful of other dolichopodid species are native to the islands in singleton lineages or small radiations. This study provides a phylogenetic perspective on the colonization history of the dolichopodid fauna in the islands. We generated a multi gene data set including representatives from 11 of the 14 endemic Hawaiian dolichopodid genera to examine the history of colonization to the islands, and analyzed it using Bayesian and maximum likelihood phylogenetic methods. We used a subset of the data that included Conchopus and the eight genera comprising the Eurynogaster complex to estimate the first phylogenetic hypothesis for these endemic groups, then used Beast to estimate their age of arrival to the archipelago. The Eurynogaster complex, Campsicnemus and Conchopus are clearly the result of independent colonizations.The results strongly support the Eurynogaster complex as a monophyletic group, and also supports the monophyly of 4 of the 8 described genera within the complex (Adachia, Arciellia, Uropachys and Eurynogaster). Members of the family Dolichopodidae have been dispersing over vast distances to colonize the Hawaiian Archipelago for millions of years, leading to multiple independent evolutionary diversification events. The Eurynogaster complex arrived in the Hawaiian Archipelago 11.8 Ma, well before the arrival of Campsicnemus (4.5 Ma), and the even more recent Conchopus (1.8 Ma). Data presented here demonstrate that the Hawaiian Dolichopodidae both disperse and diversify easily, a rare combination that lays the groundwork for field studies on the reproductive isolating mechanisms and ecological partitioning of this group.

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Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Kari Roesch Goodman conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Neal Evenhuis contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Patrick Michael O'Grady conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Field Study Permissions

The following information was supplied relating to field study approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

We thank the State of Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, the National Park Service, Maui Land and Pineapple, East Maui Irrigation, Parker Ranch, and The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii for access and permission to collect.

DNA Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding the deposition of DNA sequences:

All DNA sequences generated in this study have been deposited in Genbank.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The raw data has been supplied as a supplementary file.

Funding

This work was funded by National Science Foundation Grant DEB 0842348 to PMO. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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